The Dark Wraith Forums

The Written Peace: Open Forum of March 16, 2007

2007-03-16T01:27:00.000-05:00

Let us try this again.

Your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums has tried his best to publish a nice open thread while preparing this site for transition to a new publishing platform. Google has been working mightily to force users of its publishing platform to switch to its so-called "new" Blogger, something I will not do. Google has gone so far as to prevent me from publishing any further articles without signing its new "Terms of Agreement" and allowing their new Blogger to wreak havoc on the code I have been developing over the past two years and several months.

Yesterday, I circumvented the block Google had put into place and published a brief article here. It got deleted rather quickly.

This one won't be.

I have been awaiting the arrival of a more-or-less new computer to replace the poor beast that has labored terribly and with increasing difficulty under the strain I put on it. Fortunately, the new computer arrived yesterday, and I am bringing it up to full power tonight. It is quite a thing to behold, and now I can do things I have been unable to do for quite some time. I can also do a few things I was never able to do before.

As soon as possible, The Dark Wraith Forums will leave the less than competent hands of the folks at Google and go to the NucleusCMS platform, which is the one I use for Big Brass Blog. As I've noted before, a principal concern I have had in switching to Nucleus for this site is that commenters on Nucleus blogs have to use the old Bulletin Board Code (BBC) instead of HTML tags for mark-up. I had been hoping for the development of a module that would allow HTML tags in comments, but that hasn't happened yet.

A significant coding challenge with which I am still struggling is how to make the comments toggle from the main article in Nucleus like I've done here. One of the few good things about the old Blogger publishing platform was that it was so light-weight that I could deploy just about any coding trick I wanted in the so-called "template" (more accurately called the "index file"), and the publishing platform would have no issue with it. That's most decidedly not true of the new Blogger, as I have found out through helping others trying to make the transition. Several members of my blogScream News Wire syndicate have had fits trying to put something as straight-forward as one of the news screens into a new Blogger template. blogScream uses a very standard, harmless version of an object called an IFRAME, something that's been around for a long time; but the new Blogger is having emotional difficulties with it that are creating quite a challenge in maintaining syndicate membership levels.

And speaking of the blogScream News Wire service, it is two years old today, which means it stands as one of the longest running, continuously published news services featuring only blog headlines. Several other services like it have come and gone, but blogScream survives and will continue. Readers who see a blogScream screen on one of more than two dozen blogs across the Blogosphere are seeing headlines from some of the best progressive online writers. Click on a blogScream headline and discover a great blog.

Readers might, by the way, surmise from my two topics above that I am not currently in negotiations to sell blogScream to Google, even though it sometimes seems that every other online publisher of something even halfway interesting is. In the extraordinarily unlikely event that the bandwidth sucking, Chinese censorship enabling, technologically incompetent, wannabe monopolists at Google were to approach me on such a matter, I would be torn between the choices of telling them to bite me or to kiss my backside. Making not one dime of profit is far preferable to garnering a fortune from oafs.

Enough about that.

Over at Big Brass Blog, I published an editorial on what's happening with the stock markets. (That article was supposed to be part of the "Open Forum of March 13, 2007," which never got published here because Google was blocking me from access to the publishing platform).

My assessment of what's going on was typically dour, but let me assure readers here of this: it could get a whole lot worse than even I am describing. In my best judgment, the economic circumstances of many, many people will take a turn for the worse. Most of those people for at least a while will not get their minds around how bad it's getting for them personally. It will take time to sink in. People have been getting used to a modest version of this downward spiral for a few years now; but for most, it's been happening to someone else, and to the extent that it's been happening to them, they have not been making the connection between the world of large-scale financial, economic, and political policies and the consequentially adverse impact of those policies on their own lives.

The understanding of the deep connections will come, but it will come slowly, and it will never be a full understanding for most people. Even though I would like it otherwise, it isn't really all that important that most people will persistently lack a comprehensive grasp of the scope of the incompetence and mendacity that are the very cause of the bad times ahead.

As long as the average American finally figures out who is to blame, all is good. If that average American finally figures out who is to hang, all is even better than good.

Say what you have to say, here. This is an open thread. This post will not get deleted, and the comment facility is working (which it wasn't for my first attempt at this).

Once I've opened the espresso bar and put some snacks out for everyone, maybe we'll have a contest featuring people who try to impersonate a neo-con on the run from a noose. Or maybe we'll do one of those contests where we see who can hold out the longest from laughing when we say things like "The GOP is the party of fiscal restraint."

I did hint over on an open thread at Big Brass Blog that I might get some nude breakdancing going now that I've waxed the dance floor. I'll try to talk Peter of Lone Tree into doing a duo with me on that. If things turn rowdy, we might be able to get some kind of choreographed number going with Minstrel Boy, blackdog, Mr. Goat, and Father Tyme joining me for an interpretive dance to the music from some good, post-Apocalypse movie like Kevin Costner's, The Postman, all of this to the purpose, quite obviously, of ensuring that we still have a good time even as we descend into Hell.

Yes, indeed.

The Dark Wraith does his best to keep people from becoming too pessimistic about the misery, poverty, strife, and absence of acceptable feng shui that may be visited upon us as a nation.

Editorial: The Pardon Problem

2007-03-10T16:52:00.000-05:00

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, formerly the Chief of Staff to Vice President Richard Cheney, was convicted last week on four counts of lying to FBI investigators and a grand jury about when he disclosed to outside sources that Valerie Plame was a non-official cover CIA operative. The most serious of the charges upon which he was convicted was obstruction of justice in the investigation of the circumstances that led to the outing of Ms. Plame, whose husband, Joseph Wilson, had investigated and publicly debunked claims by the Bush Administration that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had tried to procure partially processed uranium from Niger.

The White House had been using the mainstream media, particularly certain reporters like Judith Miller of The New York Times, to promote a largely false case for waging war on Iraq based upon claims by Administration officials that Saddam was seeking to procure, develop, and deploy nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction. Evidence put into the record at Mr. Libby's trial confirms long-standing suspicions and open allegations that the White House, faced with challenges to the credibility of its representations regarding the Iraqi dictator, engaged in a systematic pattern of revenge upon critics who had evidence or belief that the Administration's case was, at best, overblown and, at worst, entirely fabricated. The outing of Ms. Plame sent a strong signal to the intelligence community that taking public exception to the White House would be at the high risk of professional and possibly even personal harm: an exposed undercover operative, as well as his or her contacts, faces permanent, possibly life-threatening dangers after being revealed, and few career employees, especially those working in law enforcement at the national or international level, would be willing to bear such dangers merely to express a judgment in dissent to the highest ranks of a powerful, single-minded, vengeful Executive Branch.

Mr. Libby has vowed through his attorneys to seek a retrial and, failing to obtain such, has vowed to appeal his conviction in federal court. In fact, the appeal of the conviction is automatic; but the point of Mr. Libby's stance is that he will not take the adverse judgment of the federal jury lying down. The arguments he will set forth in seeking retrial are still to be fully formed, as are the arguments that will be placed before the Court of Appeals. As a matter of statistics, the likelihood of Mr. Libby being granted a retrial are slim, and the prospect that an Appeals Court will find substantive error in the trial is even more so.

In the absence of relief in retrial or appeal, Mr. Libby faces a maximum of 25 years in prison and a fine of one million dollars. While it is unlikely that the presiding trial judge, Reggie Walton, will "throw the book" at the convict, it is equally unlikely that Mr. Libby will altogether avoid serving prison time and paying a huge amount of money in fines. As a so-called "white collar criminal," and especially one who served at the behest of a sitting President of the United States, Mr. Libby's prison term would be served in a minimum security facility (with thanks to Richard Crane for pointing out that the camp originally suggested in this article is now closed). While nothing like living as a free person, the convict serving time in such a facility certainly does not suffer many of the deprivations and physical dangers that those serving in higher-security prisons face day in and day out. Although references to 'minimum security golf resorts' abound (one prison administrator describes his minimum security facility as "Camp Cupcake"), Mr. Libby would probably prefer to choose his own golf courses and foursome partners, so he'll make every effort to avoid what would otherwise be a stint in the gilded confines of a minimum security federal prison, comfortable as it might be.

Absent the retrial or overturn of his conviction on appeal, Mr. Libby's only chance of avoiding the certain, permanent stain of being a convicted felon and the near-certain, fairly long pain of confinement is an official pardon for his criminal acts by the President of the United States. Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution reserves to the sitting President the privilege of "Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States except in Cases of Impeachment." The language is clear, simple, and without recourse by those who might object to any particular case in which the President has granted clemency. Presidents, including the incumbent, have used this power with greater or lesser liberality, particularly in the waning days of their Administrations, when personal political backlash would be minimal or when legacy of mercy was being burnished. The constitutional provision is given procedural specificity by Part 1 of Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which sets forth the way in which a convict may seek, through the Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice, clemency from the President. While quite specific, the statute is entirely non-binding upon the President, who may, at his or her discretion, choose to partially or wholly circumvent the process set forth therein. Even at that, though, it is quite likely that Mr. Libby, having exhausted all personal avenues of possible exoneration, would follow the steps prescribed in Title 28, provided President Bush had not already pardoned him.

While many commentators have expressed the opinion that a Presidential pardon (the highest of possible grants of clemency) is almost certain for Mr. Libby, such mercy granted by Mr. Bush would be highly problematic for those in an Administration hoping that the conviction of Mr. Cheney's former Chief of Staff is the official end of the so-called "Valerie Plame Scandal."

Any pardon Mr. Bush would grant Mr. Libby would have to be broad in scope, expressly protecting the latter from future prosecution on charges related to, but separate from, those for which he was just convicted. Such protective wording of a pardon would be along the lines of "...any and all acts carried out in the course of duties." While not rising to the level of so-called "blanket" immunity (exempting the individual from prosecution for any prior acts), such a pardon would have the effect of being an extraordinarily broad "use" immunity to keep any future investigation from leading to charges against Mr. Libby for what he did for and at the behest of higher White House officials. In other words, in any future trials involving White House officials who were part of the smear campaign against Valerie Plame and her husband, Mr. Libby's pardon would have to ensure that he would not face "jeopardy" in both the common and legal senses of that word.

But therein lies the problem: in any future legal proceeding, be it at the level of a federal grand jury, in a District Court, or before a congressional commmittee, Mr. Libby could not decline to respond to any question by invoking the Fifth Amendment, which would otherwise protect him from being compelled to give self-incriminating statements. Mr. Libby could, in fact, not incriminate himself in any manner that would lead to jeopardy for him.

Worse, if he were to decline to speak fully and truthfully anyway, he could at a minimum be charged with contempt of court and quite probably also be charged with obstruction of justice; and no such charges against him would be covered by the Presidential pardon because they were ex post acts in transgression of law and were committed subsequent to his "official duties" since he is no longer an officer of the Executive Branch.

Even future claims by Mr. Libby of defects in his memory of certain events would surely lead to punishment because that defense had already been rejected at trial and could not be revisited by Mr. Libby in future proceedings. To do so would virtually ensure a finding of contempt of court were he to persist in representing that he could not remember when events occurred.

Granted a Presidential pardon, then, Mr. Libby would be an extraordinary legal danger to those in the White House who directed, participated in, or subsequently obstructed the investigation of the Valerie Plame Scandal. A Presidential pardon broad enough to protect Mr. Libby would turn him into a veritable treasure trove of information awaiting responsible congressional and law enforcement authorities willing and able to fully extract from him what he most certainly knows about the possible criminal acts of Administration officials who, in their wildly imaginative case for war, used the power of their offices to wreck those who knew they were lying.

Key, however, to Mr. Libby's possible future role as an informant with no meaningful right against self-incrimination is a thorough investigation, followed by a comprehensive prosecution of all involved. That federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was inadequate to that large, grave, and necessary work must not disabuse other officials of what is not merely their constitutional duty, but is more to the point their moral obligation to right this one of many wrongs committed by an Administration unfettered by any internal sense of its own responsibility to adhere to the rule of law.

The Dark Wraith encourages President George W. Bush, in the spirit of mercy and friendship, to pardon I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Analysis: The Economics of Wreckage, Part One

2007-03-03T21:36:00.000-05:00

This is the first of a three-part series on macroeconomic financial effects of the Presidency of George W. Bush. On Tuesday, February 27, 2007, stock markets around the world dropped precipitously, led into the vortex by China, where the Shanghai Stock Exchange lost almost nine percent of its value. Major stock indices in the U.S. followed suit, wiping out recent gains that had brought forth breathless praise from the mainstream media about near-record highs that were nothing more than a brief, illusory departure from the pattern of abysmal real returns that common stock portfolios have offered investors over the past six years.

This first part of the series is the latest in a continuing program of index portfolio analyses that have been an on-going project here at The Dark Wraith Forums. Readers who have followed previous installments may recall that negative or miserably weak positive returns on equity index investments have been the typical outcome of these calculations in the past. Only in the last installment, published just after the sixth anniversary of President Bush's inauguration in 2001, did even one of the major indices, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, register a barely positive annualized real rate of return over the six years, and the decline in that and the other U.S. indices served to bring all three of the averages surveyed here back into line with the overall negative performance they have displayed over the tenure of the Bush Administration.

This first part, then, is a reminder to all who would offer even a modicum of praise for the Bush Administration's record as the steward of the American economy. Financial markets do not lie. They do not fabricate numbers, nor do they manipulate quantitative outcomes to suit the public relations purposes of the neo-conservatives; instead, the inflation-adjusted returns on investment in the three major stock indices of the United States calculated and presented below deliver the stark, objective assessment generated from trillions and trillions of trades involving nearly incomprehensible amounts of money: the Bush Administration has been an engine of financial depletion of the value of claims on ownership in American companies publicly listed by the three largest, most comprehensive stock indices.

The second part of this series will provide a standard, relatively simple macroeconomic model of the distribution of spending that comprises the total national income of a country, and that model will be applied to explain the way in which the United States government has financed hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit spending through the use of its trade deficits, particularly those it has run with China, which has for years deliberately manipulated the exchange rate of its currency, the yuan, with the U.S. dollar to the end of causing American greenbacks to flow to the central bank of China, which then used those dollars to finance the staggering budget deficits the Republicans have created year after year.

The third part of the series will review the dynamics by which the U.S. trade deficits with China have fostered the conditions the Bush Administration exploited to maintain abnormally low tax rates concomitantly with profligate spending, particularly on wars of opportunity. That third installment will conclude with the explanation of why the Shanghai stock market necessarily had to crash and what will be the likely consequences of recent economic events on the long-term prospects of a United States weakened by the irresponsible incompetence of the Bush Administration and its Republican cohorts who, until just recently, served as the exclusive, if unworthy, stewards of a nation that could have been far better off than it will be as the incontrovertible result of their time in power.

Responsibility Assigned
George W. Bush became the 43rd President of the United States on January 20, 2001. Until January 4, 2007, when the Democrats took control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, the Republicans had controlled both the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government, save for a brief period in mid- to late-2001 when a Republican-turned-Independent caused an even split in the Senate. Over the past six years, then, the financial house of this country has been in the virtually uninterrupted hands of the GOP, during which time the federal government went from running growing budget surpluses in the last years of the Clinton Administration to bleeding hundreds of billions of dollars in red ink every year under President George W. Bush and his congressional allies.

The Republican Party, through its legislators in Congress and its President in the White House, has overseen the abysmal performance of the U.S. stock markets, which represent the overwhelming bulk of the value of all public ownership of American corporations. It is in the stocks traded on these exchanges that much of the wealth of the nation is invested by everything from huge pension and mutual funds to individual speculators.

The GOP has no one but its own elected representatives to blame, notwithstanding any possible obfuscation by its elected representatives or their apologists in the mainstream media or among the tap-dancing ranks of the Right-wing punditry brigade. Republican economics has been a failure: it is based upon budget deficit-driven fiscal stimulus financed by trade deficits that have had the effect of causing the sell-off of the American capital base, which America's trading partners have then lent back to the United States government to finance its budget shortfalls. The irresponsible policy pursued by Mr. Bush, the Republicans in Congress, and their neo-conservative pseudo-intellectual backers is a twist on Keynesian economic policy prescriptions, but true Keynesians would never have abided fiscal health-draining deficits for more than a short period of time, and they never would have even so much as suggested hocking the American economy to an enormous, mercantilist-Communist country that has cynically, systematically distorted exchange rates to draw American dollars and jobs from America's shores.

Index Portfolio Performance during the Bush Administration to Date
As of (and including) Friday, March 2, 2007, George W. Bush had been President of the United States 2,233 days. As pointed out above, responsibility for the huge federal budget deficits year after year that have hallmarked the rule of the Republicans rests squarely with their party, its legislators in Congress, and the policy-makers in the White House, including George W. Bush, himself. Similarly, the Republicans have no one but themselves to blame for what is shown below to have been an unconscionable erosion of the purchasing power of dollars invested in the three largest U.S. stock indices over the six years that George W. Bush has been President of the United States.

From the first day of trading, January 22, 2001, after President Bush became the 43rd President of the United States, until the last trading day, March 2, 2007, before the publication date of this article, the performance of the major stock markets—measured by the index portfolios of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Standard & Poor's 500, and the NASDAQ Composite—has been abysmal: all three indices have delivered negative real returns on investment over the term of the past six years.

January 22, 2001, was the first day of trading after Mr. Bush became President. The three major stock market indices stood at the following levels at the close of trading on that day:

January 22, 2001, Index Closing Values
Dow Jones Industrial Average	10,578.24
Standard & Poor's 500	1,342.90
NASDAQ Composite	2,757.91

At the close of trading on Friday, March 2, 2007, these same three averages stood at the following levels:

March 2, 2007, Index Closing Values
Dow Jones Industrial Average	12,114.10
Standard & Poor's 500	1,387.17
NASDAQ Composite	2,368.00

If an investor were to have formed a portfolio based upon each of these three indices and managed each portfolio in terms of composition and balance to mirror the relevant index, the investor would have earned the following total nominal returns on investment over the 2,233 days from January 22, 2001, to March 2, 2007:

Total Nominal Portfolio Returns from 1/22/2001 to 3/2/2007
Dow Jones Industrial Average	14.52%
Standard & Poor's 500	3.30%
NASDAQ Composite	-14.14%

Expressing these returns on an annualized (that is, "percentage return per year compounded") basis, the nominal results just presented are as follows:

Annualized Nominal Portfolio Returns from 1/22/2001 to 3/2/2007
Dow Jones Industrial Average	2.24%
Standard & Poor's 500	0.53%
NASDAQ Composite	-2.46%

The above are nominal (that is, "not corrected for inflation") results. Taking into account the erosion of purchasing power (that is, "the effect of inflation") on portfolio values over the holding period requires adjusting each of the current values to its equivalent purchasing power value on January 22, 2001. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index data for January 2001, the CPI stood at 175.1, and for January 2007, the CPI stood at 202.4. The February 2007 figure can be estimated by various methods, and here, a conservative projection of 202.76 is derived from the three-month moving average of the CPI, implying an annualized inflation rate for the February of 2.2 percent, based upon the average of the annualized inflation rates for the previous three months.

Expressing the closing index portfolio values as of Friday, March 2, 2007, in terms of their January 2001 purchasing power equivalents provides the following results:

March 2, 2007, Index Values in January 2001 Purchasing Power Value
Dow Jones Industrial Average	10,461.55
Standard & Poor's 500	1,197.94
NASDAQ Composite	2,044.97

The total real return on investment for each portfolio is then the quotient of the January 2001 index value when divided into the adjusted March 2, 2007, value:

Total Real Portfolio Returns from 1/22/2001 to 3/2/2007
Dow Jones Industrial Average	-1.10%
Standard & Poor's 500	-10.79%
NASDAQ Composite	-25.85%

Finally, expressing these real returns on an annualized (that is, "percentage return per year compounded") basis, the total real return results just presented are as follows:

Annualized Real Portfolio Returns from January 22, 2001, to March 2, 2007
Dow Jones Industrial Average	-0.18%
Standard & Poor's 500	-1.85%
NASDAQ Composite	-4.78%

The total and annualized real returns to the selected portfolios are presented below in graphical form:

As is plainly evident, real returns on investment in three large U.S. stock indices, representing as they do the majority of ownership value in publicly traded U.S. corporations, have been negative. Investing in even the very largest, presumably safest public corporations would have led to an actual loss of money in real terms, and that loss would have been worse by investing in smaller-cap public companies through the NASDAQ Composite.

In practical terms, the numbers above mean this: an investor putting $100 on January 20, 2001, into a portfolio of the Dow Jones 30 Industrials and maintaining the index balance until March 2, 2007, would now have the purchasing power of $98.90; an investor doing the same but investing in the Standard & Poor's 500 would now have the purchasing power of $89.21; and an investor doing the same but investing in the NASDAQ Composite index would now have the purchasing power of $74.15.

Investing in stocks, particularly in well-balanced portfolios, is supposed to create capital appreciation in real terms over a long period of holding time; instead, over the course of the Bush Administration, investments in well-balanced, standard index portfolios have resulted in real purchasing power erosion of dollars invested.

This is objective evidence, accumulating over more than six years, of fiscal mismanagement on a scale that will be felt for generations to come. This, then, is objective evidence of a degraded future for the United States, whose citizens will labor mightily under the after-effects of economic degradation caused by men and women in Washington who posed as prudent, fiscal conservatives, but instead acted in a more economically reckless manner than any American leadership in decades.

This series will continue in the next installment with a survey of the national income allocation model, which will be used to explain the way in which the Republicans propelled the economy far too long on funds borrowed from overseas investors who got their money to make the loans by bleeding the American economy of both its greenbacks and its jobs.

The Dark Wraith trusts that readers will stay tuned.

Editorial: Twit Journalism and the Professor from Hell

2007-02-28T00:32:00.000-05:00

Although I shall within the next several days address at length the world-wide stock market crash that occurred today, I herewith take the opportunity to briefly and succinctly deal with a news article on this matter written by CNNMoney.com senior writer Alexandra Twin. I quote the first two paragraphs below and ask readers to note carefully the very last sentence.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Stocks slumped Tuesday on worries about economic growth at home and abroad, sending the Dow industrials to their biggest point drop since the day the market reopened after the Sept. 11 attacks.

A big decline in Chinese stocks, weakness in some key readings on the U.S. economy and news that Vice President Dick Cheney was the apparent target in a Taliban suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan all fueled the selling on Wall Street.

What follows is my very brief response, offered as it is from my position as a professor who turns without warning into a roaring bitch when journalistic stupidity passes a certain threshold.

No, the world-wide stock market crash that happened on Tuesday, February 27, 2007, had nothing whatsoever to do with a suicide bomber who killed a bunch of people in Afghanistan in a failed and futile attempt to assassinate U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney. Absolutely nothing. To ascribe a planet-wide slide of stock markets that slashed the net assessed values of claims on residual cashflow anywhere from four to nine percent to "weakness in some key readings on the U.S. economy and news that Vice President Dick Cheney was the apparent target in a Taliban suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan" is evidence that CNNMoney.com believes—or is at the very least cynically willing to offer to its readers—the utterly ridiculous: a wholly false and imaginary world of the 21st Century where the markets of tens and hundreds of billions of trades totaling trillions and trillions of dollars stand in rapt awe of a slate of transitory U.S. government statistics (some of which had not even been released when the globe-spanning crash got underway) and a trouble-making, incompetent American Vice President.

The markets of the world weren't waiting to jump off a cliff if bad inventory numbers got pumped out by the U.S. government; the markets of the world weren't waiting to claw their chests open if Dick Cheney heard a big boom; and Wednesday, quite fortunately, I can assure you that not one of my business or economics students will be so fresh as to give me an explanation like that when I ask about the forces that caused the stock markets to slide as they did on Tuesday. That's because my students, even the rank freshmen who've been in my classes only about a month, know better than to give me stupid, simplistic, vapid explanations, particularly when I come in looking like I'm ready to eat someone's head off because I've been reading poundingly corny news analysis the night before.

Sadly, my students' unwillingness to spout the ridiculous means not one of them will ever qualify to become a "senior writer" for CNNMoney.com, where news analysis is predicated, first and foremost, on thinking like a twit and then displaying the wretched product of that thinking for all the world to read.

The Dark Wraith just winces at what passes for an educated financial journalist these days.

Special Blog Post: The locusts shall not prevail.

2007-02-24T12:38:00.000-05:00

Several weeks ago, two bloggers who had been hired by the John Edwards for President campaign became the target of criticism by Bill Donohue, the leader of a religious organization called the Catholic League. One of those two bloggers is Melissa McEwan, who uses the pen name Shakespeare's Sister on her blog of the same name. Ms. McEwan is a friend of mine. We became acquainted because we were both commenters at AMERICAblog, and we ultimately began our own work as Weblog publishers and writers at about the same time. Ms. McEwan, in fact, reached out to find me after we had stopped commenting at AMERICAblog: she wanted me to know about her new blog, and she wanted to know what I was doing. It was through her generous effort, then, that we became reunited in our separate but mutual efforts to speak out against the Bush Administration, the religious zealots, the neo-conservatives, and all the others who have made this century open in such a grim and awful way.

In Mr. Donohue's inflammatory press release condemning the two women Mr. Edwards had hired, he declared that the Edwards campaign "has no choice but to fire them immediately." His press release and subsequent comments deriding Ms. McEwan gave members of his organization (and perhaps others sympathetic to his concerns) what they perceived as license to flood her with e-mail, some of which was violently threatening, hateful, menacing, and altogether unworthy of anyone who would pose to speak on behalf of an organization affiliated with any Christian church committed to the New Covenant. Whether or not Mr. Donohue accepts responsibility for the cyber-violence his condemnation of her brought about, he was not merely the catalyst; he was the instigator.

The much-touted constitutional protection of citizen speech is a right to the extent that the Constitution does not recognize the government's role in restricting it. This leaves to the federal legislature, the several states, the civil society, and the courts such responsibility as necessarily exists for defining the distinction between speech and conduct and the setting forth the boundaries where speech becomes actionable under civil and/or criminal law. Speech that is an incitement to riot is not without sanction because it interferes with the compelling interest of the government in maintaining civil order; speech that endangers others in demonstrable ways is subject to scrutiny because of the compelling interest of the government in protecting its citizens. Where the line is drawn is always a matter of controversy, and that line shifts over time as new dimensions of speech and innovative experiments in existing modes of communication arise.

Mr. Donohue cannot simply declare that his was protected speech: demonstrably, it led at a minimum to civil assault upon Ms. McEwan, this being the case because "assault" involves a reasonable belief on the part of the victim that she is in imminent, personal danger. Mr. Donohue had created a sense in his followers that theirs was a threatened—indeed, persecuted—lot and, because of the perilous condition of their right to worship as they wished, they would consequentially have not merely the option of reactive violence to perceived threats, but compelling religious duty to react as necessary to protect their religion.

I shall not leave to the likes of men like Mr. Donohue their sentiment that they may continue to terrorize those whose voices are strongly contrary to their own. As a matter of fact and evidence, he was the proximate initiator of events that led to cyber-violence. Whether or not he believes that his god will reward him for what he loosed upon Ms. McEwan and the other blogger by describing them as "trash-talking bigots," responsible agents of the civil society must take notice and respond within the bounds of law and efficacy; and ultimately, that civil society, through its responsible, concerned agents, must compel both statutory and common law to address those who would use the Internet to incite individuals to become a menacing mob.

As an important note with regard to the above, I have found no instance of an official statement by the Catholic League condemning the threatening e-mail messages received by Ms. McEwan. Neither have I found an official statement by that organization ordering its member to cease such activities. Indeed, I have found no spoken or written evidence that any official of the League took advantage of what was happening to counsel the membership on rightful action in accordance with Christian teachings. Should such firm, resolute, and forceful efforts to stop the mob violence have been widely promulgated, I shall amend this article to include praise of that work.

Cyber-attacks come in many forms. Some, like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and spambot slams, are highly technical and seemingly impersonal, although some of them are not nearly as random as might first appear. My servers have labored occasionally under these types of assaults. The cyber-attack on Ms. McEwan was far more obviously personal and infinitely more frightening; but it was, at its essence, the very same type of strategy with a very similar objective: swarm and silence the target.

Mr. Donohue's followers who went after Ms. McEwan were extraordinary in their numbers. In that way, they were just like the multiple sources in a distributed denial of service attack; and similarly, their objective was to drive Ms. McEwan from a position of visibility and influence.

In the end, they succeeded, but only nominally: Ms. McEwan's voice lives on as Shakespeare's Sister; and, if anything, Mr. Donohue has made her influence greater if unofficial. She need no longer concern herself with parsing her language to meet the needs of John Edwards as he fashions himself a respectable candidate who is "personally offended" by what he otherwise should have tolerated were he to really want strong, feminist thinking within his inner circle of advisers and assistants.

For my own part, I am relieved that I no longer have to consider mincing words about John Edwards, who thinks he is centering himself politically even as he panders to interests in ways that I find altogether troubling. While I most likely would not have held my criticism of Mr. Edwards even if Ms. McEwan had continued to serve as a technical adviser to his campaign, I now no longer have to worry about whether or not she would take flak for continuing to associate with me as I escalated my own critical rhetoric.

Distributed denial of service cyber-attackers and the vitriolic e-mail attackers are of the same breed: They are locusts. Stopping one of them does no good; stopping a dozen or a hundred of them is useless; stopping a thousand of them is trivial. They just keep coming and coming. It is not in their individual actions that they do their damage, but rather in their collective menace, their smothering erosion, that they cause their great harm.

They swarm, and in the time of their swarming, the victim believes that the onslaught will never end absent his or her full-scale retreat.

Long before I came to be a writer here in this venue, I wrote on message boards. My words were far harsher than they are in this time of my life. When finally the time came that I had offended several who could call the locusts down upon me, I backed down and completely disappeared from the Internet. There was nothing else I could do. More importantly from a personal perspective, I had the ungodly, awful, penetrating sense that the attacks upon me would never end and that, sooner or later, one or more of those violent people writing to me and about me were going to find me and kill me. At one point, I wished that it would happen just so the dread of waiting would be at its end. Every light shining in my window at night was the end coming; every time the phone rang, it might be one of the maniacs; every car that followed me for too long on a darkened road was the end about to happen.

Was all of this my own, personal, delusional paranoia? In fact, I was followed late at night on several nights; property of mine was destroyed; and other, much worse things that I shall not share were visited upon me. I literally, honestly wanted to be at the end of myself as a living person. I had been humiliated, I had been wrecked. Most tellingly, all the moral support, all the kind and generous words I received, meant nothing.

And, of course, I was silenced.

The locusts swarmed; and thereby, those who had summoned them won.

Never again, though.

Let me make it entirely clear that, while I can take care of myself—I have made it one of my principal life endeavors—to ensure my ability to strike back destructively against cyber-attackers, this is not what other potential victims should have to do. Progressive bloggers, both individually and collectively, should not have to live with an intimidating sense that they might be targeted, attacked, and wrecked by Right-wing secular and religious zealots. Extremists are an expanding ball of fire that just keeps right on billowing with every drop of blood they draw. Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Bill Donohue, and dozens of other significant and minor invokers of the swarm thrive on their minions who pay them to spew hate and who would gleefully leap into the air to join a swarm against some defenseless victim.

Countervailance against the swarm is not within the scope of most individual bloggers. It must be more than a group effort; it must, in fact, be an official effort of a scope, funding, and gravity commensurate with the threat the Right-wing zealots pose to civil society.

That means those who would benefit from our progressive voices, Democrats and moderate Republicans alike, must take responsibility for ensuring that the netroots, which will become more and more important to them as time goes by, can function without fear of cyber-attacks.

Chet Scoville of Vanity Press recently published a post, cross-posted at Big Brass Blog, in which he cited an article by Jeffrey Feldman advocating the formation by the Democratic National Committee of a full-fledged task group dedicated to "...protecting Democratic candidates... from the cancer of organized Republican smear." Specific responsibilities of the task group are laid out, including "Republican smear campaign forecasts; Status of ongoing (smear) campaigns; Framing and Keyword analysis; Background research (presumably on known and suspected smear instigators); Strategy and tactic suggestions; Internet activist reports..."

Mr. Scoville adds to Mr. Feldman's fine list the importance of every Democratic campaign having its own version of this task group. This is important because the work of the national group would have to be articulated and augmented by any particular candidate to operationalize meaningful action and response to smear campaigns. Invoking the model and terminology of Robert Altemeyer (recently discussed by Minstrel Boy of Harp and Sword), who has extensively researched what he calls "Right-wing Authoritarians" and "Social-Dominance Oriented" individuals, I commented on Mr. Scoville's article in part as follows:

The Southern Poverty Law Center offers the model for cataloguing, monitoring, and tracking hate groups. What is being proposed in your article seems at first blush far more ambitious, if only because the source of these hate attacks appears more ubiquitous. Actually, it is not: the so-called "Right-Wing Authoritarian Followers" comprise maybe about a quarter of the population of this country, but the overwhelming majority of them are dormant unless harangued into action.

We have seen this before: huge numbers of RWA-F lie dormant until a Social Dominance-Oriented/Right-Wing Authoritarian (SDO/RWA) "double high" (as such a person is called in the literature) draws them to action. In historical terms, we saw this with a certain group of evangelicals who were brought to bear by Jerry Falwell; we saw it with Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum (with the Equal Rights Amendment); and we saw it again several times in the '90s, and one last time quite starkly with the thugs who laid siege to the facilities where Florida election officials were trying to commence a recount of the 2000 Presidential Election votes.

The RWA Followers are not dangerous unless and until they are bid to action by a small core of leader types, generally either financially well-off, themselves (as with Melton Scaif), or capable of generating large amounts of money (as with Pat Robertson, Sun Myung Moon, and Paul Weyrich).

As far as mitigating their influence is concerned, to some extent, it is a matter of open exposure. The RWA Followers are actually rather immune to public humiliation, but some (not all, but some) of the SDOs that set them in motion are fairly sensitive to the limelight, especially when it turns against them and they cannot cloister themselves against awareness of it.

To the extent that wide-ranging exposure of their action is not enough to slow them down, though, the next step is to move against them in the courts. This includes suits alleging torts, particularly torts of interference with business relationships. It also includes suits alleging defamation. Finally, it also includes an all-out effort to bring civil RICO charges to bear on them and their lieutenants.

To this last point, there will come a time when we must clarify in our own minds that this isn't "just politics"; this is, instead, an organized criminal enterprise that has spanned well more than a decade and used hundreds of millions of dollars to the purpose not of benefiting the democratic experience of these United States, but instead of interfering with and degrading it.

However, that comment having been made, this work, as important as it is, cannot be the extent of dealing with those who would cause the violence Ms. McEwan suffered. It really doesn't even address what can happen to progressive bloggers unless the umbrella of protection extends past the candidates, themselves, and reaches deep into the progressive Blogosphere.

In fact, an official task group at the national level cannot succeed unless that task group uses as one of its primary resources the bloggers who could very well be at the shock front of any smear campaign. We are the ones who see the ebbs and flows of trolls; we are the ones who get the e-mails that we actually open and read; we are the ones who look at our hit counters for nuances of increased traffic; we are the ones who read the details of our incoming visitor traffic reports, meaning we can often see the source that has referenced trolls to our sites.

And, as time goes on, it is we the progressive bloggers who will know far better than candidates and their suit-and-tie type of technical advisers the terrain here in cyberspace. It is we who will know the lay of the land and the threat level presented by trolls and other harsh commenters. It is we who will take the messages of presidential candidates and echo them across the electronic world. Unlike the mainstream media, which for the most part uses the Internet as an after-market publication platform, we bloggers are often the wells from which arise into the electronic information stream the character and quality of candidates through what they are saying that the mainstream media might very well be trivializing or even ignoring.

But it goes beyond merely "tracking" Right-wing smear campaign organizers. Unless and until the necessary resources are brought to bear in law enforcement actions by those who know how to use such instrumentalities, the Right will just keep on calling the swarms.

That means the DNC or whoever would form a full-blown task group has to deal with men like Mr. Donohue by filing complaints with the IRS for the violation by the Catholic League of prohibitions on issue advocacy by 501(c)(3) groups. That means aggregating threatening e-mail messages on behalf of targeted bloggers and moving that menacing literature to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That means having attorneys who can issue letters to the smear campaign organizers laying the blame at their feet and demanding that they issue public statements ordering their followers to stop. That means, when those smear campaign initiators smirk and say there's nothing they can do about it, hauling them into civil court and hammering away at them until they get tired of the litigation pain and learn how to control themselves when they write and speak. That means fighting back as a concerted, sustained, unrelenting, opposing force.

That's how you stop the locusts.

If the Democratic National Committee and the candidates haven't the interest to provide for our protection under some national task force dedicated to dealing with smear campaigns, then the DNC and the Democratic candidates have done themselves every bit as much harm as they have allowed to happen to us. And if the Democratic Party and those candidates believe they can come to us thinking we'll hand them free air time, they simply must understand that we will accommodate them only to the extent that they grasp our significance to the world of tomorrow. If they cannot bring themselves to stand up for us, they should not be surprised when we deploy our own net of defenses and then ask them, "Where exactly were you when the locusts came to pick us off one by one?"

Likely, the Democratic National Committee will protect itself, and each of the major Democratic candidates will protect himself or herself. Those candidates will still come to us, hat in hand, expecting us to speak favorably of them and use our valuable resources to their own political gain. In that event, they will find this: learning how to survive in a world of hate—be it on the violent streets of urban America or in the streams of cyber-violence in the online world—means learning how to grow up strong, mean, and unforgiving, especially of cowards who could have helped but would rather stand in the bright sunlight waving to the adoring crowds of sheep.

Whatever choices are made by others, though, one thing is certain for us, the progressive bloggers out here in the field.

The locusts shall not prevail.

The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Special Video Post: Statement

2007-02-16T22:15:00.000-05:00

YouTube public URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Wd4yIOeKY

Click here to view the video as a WMV file (42 seconds, 912 kilobytes)

This YouTube video may be reposted with attribute.

Principles of Economics: Origins of the Discipline, Video Edition

2007-02-12T21:53:00.000-05:00

Updated 2/16/07 At the beginning of each semester in Principles of Economics classes, I deliver a lecture entitled "Origins of the Discipline." This lecture is given in both traditional classroom settings and in telecourses broadcast to satellite campuses. I am herewith offering that lecture from the beginning of the current semester as a multi-part YouTube video for readers here at The Dark Wraith Forums: Part 1 was posted Monday, February 12, 2007, Part 2 was posted Tuesday, February 13, 2007, Part 3 was posted on Thursday, February 15, 2007 and Part 4, the final segment, has now been posted as of February 16, 2007. All four parts taken together constitute an edited version of the entirety of my "Origins of the Discipline" lecture. Below each YouTube frame is a link to the WMV format file of the video for those who would prefer to download it for viewing that way.

The Dark Wraith encourages readers to enjoy.

Click here for the WMV format version of Part 1 (4:30, 12.3 Mb).

Click here for the WMV format version of Part 2 (9:55, 11.7 Mb).

Click here for the WMV format version of Part 3 (9:54, 34.8 Mb).

Click here for the WMV format version of Part 4 (4:31, 15.4 Mb).

Special Analysis: More Practical Math for the New American Century

2007-02-09T23:12:00.000-05:00

The August 5, 2005, article, "Practical Math for the New American Century," published here at The Dark Wraith Forums provided readers with some elementary mathematical tools for calculating the destructive force of a nuclear device based upon its yield.

The possible use of nuclear devices has returned to the news with rumors of an impending airstrike to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities to thwart its potential use of such enriched uranium to build nuclear weapons. Although top-level Iranian officials have denied that the uranium they are processing will be used for anything other than peaceful purposes, concerns in Washington and Israel have led some analysts to conclude that either Israel or the United States is planning to bomb the Iranian nuclear fuel production plants. According to the Defense Department, the sites where uranium enrichment is now underway are deep underground. They are essentially massive, hardened, underground bunkers protected by as much as 70 feet of concrete and steel overlain by another 50 feet of earth. To destroy them with conventional weapons alone would be impossible, so the presumption is that whoever carries out the attack would have to use nuclear bombs to effect the necessary level of damage.

CNN.com is reporting that Iran's highest leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is concerned enough about the prospect of attack that he, himself, has spoken out, threatening to mount counter-attacks on U.S. interests and assets across the world should the United States be involved in or spearhead a strike against Iran. His concerns are perhaps enhanced by what appears to be an unwillingness even among U.S. President George W. Bush's critics to take a military strike against Iran off the table of possible responses to Tehran's alleged refusal to comply with United Nations demands that it halt its nuclear fuels production. In fact, the relatively popular U.S. Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, campaigning in Israel for the Democratic nomination, joined rivals John McCain and Mitt Romney at a public teleconference in suburban Tel Aviv to make clear his willingness to use force if discussions with Iran fail, hinting ominously, "[A]ll options must remain on table." Aljazeera described Edwards' speech supporting Israel as "shockingly bellicose," indicating that analysts in the Arab media believe Iran should not hope for a lessening of its fears of an attack merely because new voices from an American political party in opposition to the Bush Administration are entering public debate on Middle Eastern matters.

While some analyses are keyed to a U.S.-led attack on Iran, others predict that, in the absence of swift action by the Americans, the strike will be carried out by Israel, quite possibly supported by the United States. A recent post at the blog BlondeSense highlighted a March 2007 article in Vanity Fair by Craig Unger, who described in ominous terms rumors about a coming attack on Iran. In the comments to the post at BlondeSense, the role Israel would play was mentioned. Specifically, the range of bomb yields in the Israeli nuclear inventory was mentioned, with allusion being made to the Jewish State's blockbuster 400 kiloton devices and its enhanced radiation warheads.

In response, I offered a summary primer on the means by which Israel would destroy Iranian nuclear fuels production facilities in a nuclear attack. Below is an edited and expanded version of my comment, which will be followed by the application of some mathematical calculations to add a bit more of a technical, quantitative feel to what may come.

Israel will not use weapons in the 400 kiloton yield range. That would be something along the lines of nuclear overkill.

The ideal devices for use on Iran's nuclear fuels production facilities are in the one kiloton range, which is about one-fifteenth of the yield of the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and provides sufficient destructive force for the Iranian targets without the problem of overkill. Bombs with yields like this are quite likely in the Israeli arsenal, although they might very well be referenced as "enhanced radiation" devices, since that term is sometimes used rather loosely. In my article, "Practical Math for the New American Century" [linked previously], I explained that there are three principal sources of destructive power in a nuclear bomb: overpressure, heat, and radiation. As the yield of a device increases, the overpressure component comes to dominate the other two in terms of kill radius. Hence, with very low-yield weapons, the kill radius of the radiation globe will be considerably larger than that of the concussive force (or "wind," if you will). Thus, very low-yield weapons (around a kiloton or less) will be "hot radiation" bombs, doing destructive overpressure damage at a smaller scale than the thermal and radiative components. To some extent, these make for ideal "bunker busters" when used in combination with conventional bunker busters because the latter can be used to excavate a crater above a hardened underground facility, then the former can be dropped into the crater, which will focus overpressure and compromise the structural integrity of the targeted facility. The hot radiation serves to cause virtually instantaneous ignition of anything even remotely combustible within the building itself via the breaches created by the overpressure component, acting as it does to essentially "crack the can" so the intense heat can enter and start what is effectively a secondary fireball in the contained interior of the place. Everything gets destroyed, and it's not so much by the explosive force, although the whole ceiling might theoretically come down, but rather by the baking at temperatures above flashpoint for everything that's non-metallic. As far as the metal equipment, like the centrifuge components, is concerned, that will be in a thermal environment quite possibly hot enough to melt just about everything.

Given that the facility is all underground, the whole place becomes a tomb—a very hot, highly radioactive tomb, but a tomb, nonetheless.

In the aforementioned "Practical Math for the New American Century," I derived the equations for the kill zones of the three types of destructive power of a nuclear device. Again, they are as follows, with associated lethality thresholds indicated:

blast: 4.6 pounds per square inch of overpressure;
thermal radiation: 8 Calories per cm² (creating 3rd degree burns);
nuclear radiation: 500 rem.

The equations of kill radii (in kilometers) associated with "optimal height" detonation are such:

kill radius of blast = (Y_r)^0.41
kill radius of thermal radiation = (Y_r)^0.33
kill radius of nuclear radiation = (Y_r)^0.19,

where Y_r is the "yield relative" to a 2.5 kiloton device. Hence, we would use as the yield relative for a one kiloton nuclear bomb,

Y_r = 1÷2.5 = 0.4,

meaning that a one kiloton nuclear bomb has 40 percent of the yield of the baseline 2.5 kiloton weapon.

Before proceeding, it must be acknowledged that the equations above would be somewhat off for one kiloton devices detonated at ground or below-ground levels, since, as noted, the equations assume "optimal height" bursts. A little more specifically, if a nuclear device explodes in a crater already formed by a conventional bunker-buster bomb, the overpressure directly beneath the blast will be somewhat higher, as will the thermal component. The radiation globe will be contained laterally by the walls of the previously formed crater, forcing what would otherwise be a spherical shell in an airburst to deform into more of a fountain-like plume emanating from the crater. This effect, of course, will be observed with the blast wave and with the thermal shell, too; but the blast will be particularly affected since underneath the explosion presumably is a 70-foot thick stratum of concrete protecting the facility under attack. This hard surface will reflect a considerable amount of the overpressure upward. The hope, of course, is that, in so doing, the structural integrity of the concrete will suffer catastrophic failure or compromise clear through to the open chamber underneath, thereby allowing the fireball and some of the radiation to enter and do crippling damage.

These considerations having been noted, below are the calculations of the kill zones for the three destructive forces of a one kiloton nuclear device:

kill radius of blast = (0.4)^0.41 = .69 km = 2264 ft
kill radius of thermal radiation = (0.4)^0.33= .74 km = 2428 ft
kill radius of nuclear radiation = (0.4)^0.19 = .84 km = 2756 ft

Readers will notice that, unlike with a large-yield nuclear bomb, whose wide-ranging destructive power is caused principally by the blast wave, fatal heat and radiation from a low-yield nuclear device cover a wider area than does the blast wave. This is why low-yield devices are sometimes generically referred to as "enhanced radiation" devices or "dirty bombs": their largest kill zone is the one caused by the radiation from them.

Addressing the immediate problem of destroying an underground nuclear facility, then, using a low-yield nuclear bomb is not to the purpose of "blowing up" the place; it is, instead, to the purpose of blasting it open so it can then be torched and irradiated.

In a little more graphic, if wholly expository, detail, here's what should happen. A conventional bunker-buster device is detonated on the earth above the facility to form a crater, probably no more than 20 to 50 feet deep, into which the nuclear bomb is then dropped. When the nuclear device detonates, the blast wave will immediately create a spherical shell of wind, but that shell will be instantly deformed by the walls of the crater and the earth and concrete beneath, which will act as reflectors to create a complex set of waves inside and over the crater. A considerable amount of force will be exerted downward, of course, excavating earth above the concrete and then damaging the concrete, itself. The reflected pneumatic pressure will pump upward, but will encounter the echoing blast waves around and above it as they are moving back and forth and up. Those waves will cause some of the energy that had been reflected upward from the initial pounding on the concrete to reflect back downward, again hitting the already breaking concrete, further compromising it. Ideally, the concrete—reinforced as it is with steel girders—will be breaking away, with the chunks, pieces, and dust getting swept up in the "mushroom cloud" billowing out of the hole in the ground. The thermal energy of the nuclear explosion will be glazing the concrete, making it more brittle, and melting the steel girders.

All of this should happen in a period of considerably less than a second. The jackhammer effect of the overpressure, along with the heat being delivered to the concrete, might not create a catastrophic collapse of the entire ceiling of the underground bunker, but it should be more than sufficient to open a gaping hole through which the thermal energy can enter at a temperature of several thousand degrees, more than enough to burn anything of importance inside the chamber. Overpressure echoes will be pushing in, too, feeding the ball of fire roaring through the interior of the building. Radiation in the form of subatomic particles, ions, and isotopes of various kinds will deliver a thin plasma wave coursing through the raging wind and hellish fire.

The effect of all this should be utter destruction of equipment and people in the underground facility. The walls will cave under the blast and heat; the glass, metal, and wiring will all melt; and any humans unlucky enough to be anywhere inside will be baked to ash. The irradiation will ensure that whatever remains of the bunker is unapproachable for years, if not decades.

And whatever aspirations Iran had to produce nuclear fuel for peaceful or other purposes will be at an end.

The Dark Wraith trusts that readers have benefited from this educational article.